The Development of an ESP law Dictionary for the US Constitutional Cases: An Approach Based on Applied Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics

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This project aimed to produce a legal corpus for US Constitutional Cases based on 14,531 US Constitutional Cases. The purpose of this corpus was to provide the groundwork for the development of an ESP law dictionary for US Constitutional cases based on Applied Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics. In the four years since 2000, this project has focused the following five points: 1) After investigating the frequency of typical legal words and phrases used in US Constitutional cases, certain legal terms on US Constitutional cases were selected; 2) From this select group of legal terms, general words used in a legal sense (semi-technical words) were analyzed using the computer to look at the following categories: meanings, grammatical features, collocational patterns and frequently occurring specific discoursal features; 3) The rate of the occurrence of technical legal words was determined by the collocational patterns; 4) A parallel corpus (English and Japanese) for US Constitutional cases … More was created; 5) The groundwork was laid for the development of an ESP dictionary for US Constitutional cases with a number of examples of the use of legal terms based on the above research: meanings, grammatical patterns and frequency patterns. With the official approval of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, in April 2003 this project became a new project entitled "The Development of a Legal Encyclopedia based on the US Constitutional Cases Application to ESP Education in Japan (Project Number: 15320072)". In particular, this new project will focus on 5) above, the development of an ESP dictionary, which will be realised in 2006.This research had been guided theoretically by the academic fields of both Applied Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics, a considerable innovation when compared with previously published Common Law Dictionaries in both English and Japanese. Although previously published law dictionaries explain the definitions of legal technical words and their historical backgrounds, they never indicate how the legal words should be used in context. Furthermore, none of those dictionaries give an explanation about how in certain contexts general words are used in the legal sense which most frequently appears in legal documents. According to prior research conducted between 1998 and 2000, "The Development of ESP Materials and Methods through the Computer Based Analysis (Project Number: 09878047)", law students face much difficulty in reading cases because they cannot understand the use of semi-technical legal words. It is much easier for students to master the meanings of legal technical words than these semi-technical legal words. Through an investigation into the difference in use between legal words in a general context as contrasted with a legal context, this research indicates typically used patterns in US constitutional cases of general words in a legal sense as well as explaining in both English and Japanese the use of technical legal words and phrases. Less